Very chatty update - by Michal

First of all, apologies to those I owe emails to. It's embarassingly quite a few of you, but I'll get to them, I promise! This has been a really busy week. So let me catch you up.

After the service last week, I pretty much slept for two days. Amazing how the body recovers from stress! Then I caught up on all the work I'd been ignoring. Everyone give a collective sigh for midterms.

Odelia was back from her base last weekend, so I went down to Holon to hang out with her and Doron (my sister and brother, respectively - hopefully you all know that). It was nice! One of the best parts though, was when Jonathan called me Friday night after dinner, in order to light the candles together. He lit the candles, sipped the wine and ate the Shabbat challah in Jerusalem, and my dad and I chanted the blessings over the phone. It prompted a really great discussion between my father and me, and even though Jonathan and I were apart, it ended up being a wonderful Shabbat.

While I was in Holon, my father's great-aunt (I think?) was there to visit. She's in her 70s and moved here from Romania at the age of 16, and we spoke in Hebrew for two full hours about her experiences. In school we've been learning about the immigrant waves in Israel, especially the early Zionists, the Ashkenazim (European Jews) who flooded to Israel after WWII, and the discrimination that the religious Sephardim and Mizrachim (North Africa and Middle Eastern Jews) experienced when they came a little bit later.

My grandparents were straight out of a history text, I realized - they lived through WWII in Romania, then emigrated to Israel in 1950, lived in a tent in a settlement camp for six months, then were placed in Sfat. My grandmother still to this day only speaks Romanian and Yiddish - she lived in a small Yiddish community so never had to learn Hebrew. (As an aside, when I visited her Saturday at the old folk's home where she lives, I pointed to things and she told me their names in Yiddish. Yay, we're communicating!) My other side of the family, my mom's side, is also very typical - my great-grandfather escaped from Russia on a slow boat in 1904 to America, and lived in New York tenements for years, which is my grandmother's earliest memories. Amazing how the family stories and the waves of aliyah (immigration) go together!

Simcha almost became kitty kibble the other day, I was so mad. We went to bed around 1am, the average for us. But apparently Simcha hadn't played enough in the day, because at 4am we hear "meow, meow." I open the bedroom door and yell at Simcha. 5am, same thing, and I pick him up by his scruff and make it clear how unhappy I am. 6am he meows and Jonathan gets up, and I hear this huge *CRASH* and *scamper scamper.* Poor Osher had been minding his own business in the kitchen when he saw Jonathan and got scared, jumping off the counter and knocking down all of our silverware. Suffice it to say that I was awake. I had just fallen back asleep when the alarm rang at 7am. I was NOT in the best of moods that morning. (And whoever of you who's going to comment about it being practice for kids - like Mom - don't even think about it! :))

Let's see, what else... I read a six-page short story in Hebrew, and understood it! I'm excited, I'm actually getting the rest of the book. It's a translation of a book of Eli Amir's into easy Hebrew. He's a writer/politician, this book is about his experience of moving to Israel as boy from his home in Baghdad.

OH! How could I forget? I took a bellydancing class today! (And thought of you, Marilyn, the whole time.) I've always wanted to take one, so figured, why not? It was much harder than I thought, though. First, because I'm not coordinated and always have trouble in choreographed dances, and second, because it's all in Hebrew. It was only when I asked someone next to me what I was doing wrong that I realized I was missing key words like "back" (leg) and "twist." The people in the class were great, about 15 women ranging from a girl in high school to a woman who looks to be in her 60s. Two women were even religious, with their heads covered! They were wearing long skirts and changed into loose pants before class, then changed back.

For those of you interested in the language, I found out something fascinating this week. Hebrew has lots of letters with dots in the middle of the letter. The dot is called a "dagesh." Some dageshes change the sound of the letter, like the "V" letter becomes "B" with a dagesh, and a "CH" (like my name) becomes "K." But sometimes there are dageshes for no apparent reason. It turns out that there's a whole group of verbs that always have a dagesh in the second letter-place, no matter what the letter! So a Gimel, the G letter, or a Yud, Y, will have a dagesh even though it doesn't do anything to the sound of the letter. Apparently in ancient Hebrew the dagesh meant a duplication, but we don't use it now - e.g. the word for "to speak" is "L'daber." In ancient times, with the dagesh, it used to be "l'dab-ber." Now we say it the same. We only use the dagesh in modern Hebrew if we take out a letter, like in a form of "l'nagen" (to play an instrument). To say "we played" you would usually say "n-gan-noo," but instead of having two Nuns (Ns), you just put in one Nun with a dagesh in it! Isn't that cool?

And oy, it's past midnight and I should get in the shower... time really does fly when you blog. :)